- Greek Art And Architecture
(By John Boardman)Introduction: Greekness
The arts of the western world have been dominated by the art of the Greeks. Even the alternative arts of Celtic Europe or
the Asian steppes were infiltrated by classical imagery. Although this record makes it easy for us to isolate those
characteristics which distinguish Greek art from the arts of other cultures, contemporary or later, it has probably also made
it the more difficult to assess on its own terms, to judge its role and the response of those for whom it was practised, and to
value justly its profound innovations. And the attempt to define its characteristics may also do less than justice to that other
remarkable phenomenon, the rapidity of its evolution from virtual abstraction to realism; while if its history is defined in
such bald terms we may also miss other fundamental qualities-its unusual (for antiquity) subject-matter and its
preoccupation with form and proportion.
The subject-matter of Greek art was essentially man (and to a lesser degree woman). Even when he worked in near-abstract,
geometricized forms the artist's prime subjects were human, and this remains true when his skills allowed him to imitate
closely, or even to improve upon, nature. Man's actions and aspirations are performed in Greek art by the figures of gods or
heroes more often than of mortals, and often in settings, which, though dressed and furnished by their own world, belonged
to their heroic past. The gods and heroes were their ancestors; they looked like men and behaved like men. A picture of
heroic myth carried a simple message of narrative, but might equally reflect mortal and contemporary problems or
successes, as surely as the Attic playwrights explored problems of contemporary society through their dramatized versions
of tales of Troy or the heroes. A god in Greek art had the body and carriage of a perfect mortal athlete: a goddess, that of a
beautiful, or at least a determined, maternal and -wise woman. Supernatural features-breathing fire, multi-limbed, hybrid-
are generally abjured except in stories and depictions of what is virtually timeless folk tale. Monsters are remarkably
plausible: we can believe in centaurs. And, however horrific, they are there to be beaten, rather than to threaten or terrify.
The petrifying Gorgon head evolves from an eastern lion mask to the head of a beautiful woman with snake locks, no less
deadly. Animals are subordinate, decorative, or at best an expression of man's dependence on the fertility of his beasts, or
they are used in parables for mortal behaviour-the concept of Achilles as a lion and of Aesop's talking creatures is as
familiar in art as in literature, though less readily recognized. In such an art landscape is no more important than furniture.
Set all this beside the art of Egypt and the Near East, obsessed with the demonic or the ritual of court, temple, or tomb, and
judge the difference.
By about 500 B.C., in little over 200 years, the Greek artist's presentation of man had progressed from a composition of
geometricized parts to an image as detailed and plausible as any in Egypt or the Near East. To this image he added life, and
the image based on pattern and on what he knew or had been taught about the representation of man was transformed by
what he now looked at and deliberately sought to copy. The art that had offered symbols of the natural world, now by
choice imitated it. Illusion began to replace the conventional symbol: the artist began to create replicas of man as skilfully
as the poet explored his fears and hopes-to the distress of some philosophers who detected a desire to deceive.
The images were of man, the male body, and generally naked. In classical Greece athletes exercised naked, warriors could
fight near-naked, and in everyday life the bared young male must have been a fairly common sight. Artists did not need to
look for naked models of their idealized athlete figures; they had grown up in a society in which male nudity was
commonplace and a well developed body was admired. The foreigner found this behaviour disgusting, and the foreign artist
depicted nudity mainly for religious, erotic, or pathetic appeal. The Greek artist's interest in the naked male may have
exaggerated what he saw in life, but it was not to him a conscious aesthetic device. The image of the 'heroic nude' may stem
from classical Greece, but the concept does not. Later Greeks, and Romans, used Greek nude types for heroized or deified
mortals, and the genre is familiar enough to us since the Neo-classical Revival, in subjects which range from Voltaire to
Napoleon, from Beethoven to Mussolini. For us it is unnatural in life, but we have learnt to accept it in art. In classical
Greece it was not unnatural in life, and in art it required neither excuse nor explanation.